The Hitch of Rainy Day Help

And a reminder of my London Tour dates!

Feast On Your Life comes out today in the UK! Check out the beautiful cover below, and come say hi next month!

Now, to today’s question…

Dear Tamar:

Can you think of dinners that my 5-year-old can help me with? I want the preparation to take a loooong time—to eat up an afternoon—and I want the work to be repetitive and easy. He’s a carb-lover, but I can always serve him a side of toast if your ideas aren't carb-centric. I've only ever wanted quick recipes in the past so I am out of my element here.

-Rainy Day Help

Dear Rainy Day Help,

My father-in-law says one of the truest things I’ve ever heard about parenting. It comes from his own experience as a father, and it is true on the scale of aphorism or proverb. He proffers the wisdom sitting in an old wooden rocker. My storytelling mind endows him with a cob pipe, which exists only figuratively—I don’t think a pipe has ever neared his lips. “The thing about parenting is,” he says, rocking (figurative smoke curling skyward), “as soon as you think you can’t take any more, it gets easier, and as soon as you think you’ve really nailed it, it gets harder.” Rock, rock, (puff.)

As with all aphorisms, the applications are universal. Defiant toddler? Just as you begin to search “military school for the pre-verbal,” a new lucidity will appear in her eye: Yes, she says. Today, she will wear socks, after all. Just when your guard drops and you prepare to bring your new, rational child to work, she will lie down on the ground screaming, accusing you of conspiracy and injustice. The detente has ended, with no advance notice given.

You have a 5-year old. You’re familiar with this pattern. I offer my father-in-law’s distillation in case your observations haven’t cohered yet into a conclusion. I also offer it because it’s especially pertinent to a child’s behaviour in the kitchen.

There was a glorious several-month-long period during which my son stemmed kale. (Was it really several months? Did it only happen once, with the same memory that invented the cob pipe turning a one-time occurrence into a season of happy practice?) As I remember it, for that lovely time, all I had to do was rinse my habitual two bunches of Lacinato kale, then put it on a kitchen towel on the table with two mixing bowls near it and leave my son to tear the leaves from their stems. Sometimes, he wanted to be near me while he stemmed, so I would set up his kitchen stand by the stove and let him do it on foot, right beside me.

For those months (or that day? Who knows?) I had it all figured out. The issue is that, as my father-in-law sagely suggests, there’s nothing to figure out when dealing with a flux state. One day, he wouldn’t touch kale. I tried other repetitive tasks. No dice. My son may be precocious in no way other than the age at which he accused me of treating him like a member of a chain-gang. He couldn’t pronounce “r” or “th,” but could graphically describe the ways in which I was exploiting his labor. At that point, who cares about how fun it is to shell beans? Or flick the little fibrous stems off cherry tomatoes, or snap and string peas? There’s nothing to say to an enraged three-year old certain that labor law is being broken.

So it is. Until the day arrives when you are grinding breadcrumbs in a loud, rumbling food processor, and out of nowhere, your child pops up by your side, dragging a stool, insisting that she push the button. Buttons! you think. Of course! There are buttons on a toaster and a blender. Even the burner is a kind of button.

I fell into the button trap as guilelessly as I’d fallen into the kale-stemming one, devising a dozen projects that involved pressing mechanical devices, none of which were of as much interest as that first batch of breadcrumbs. (He was briefly enamored of squeezing lemons with an industrial, manual juicer. He didn’t lose interest until I bought twenty pounds of lemons.) After we watched an episode of the Great British Baking Show featuring it, he was more excited to make fougasse than he was to plan his next birthday party. Did bread baking become a reliable hobby for us? I’ll leave you to answer the question.

My point is that anything that seems like a kitchen project a child will enjoy is likely to become a kitchen project you must complete solo, while fending off requests to come up with something actually fun to do and muttering under your breath about “only doing it because it seemed fun to do together.” And whatever seems like the sort of project a child would scream and scamper away from—like gutting fish, deep frying anything, browning little quail in a hot pan (all real examples from my life)—is likely to be just the thing that brings a child to your side, begging, finally to “help.”

I don’t mean that you should give up your search for projects to occupy you and your 5-year old. I mean that if I were you, I would cast a very wide net, and not be fooled into drawing any conclusions from success or failure. I also mean to disabuse you of the fantasy of simultaneously occupying your child in the kitchen and producing dinner. Not that it will never happen. Only that it raises the stakes—already subject to the natural law of childhood and parenting, according to which anything that makes sense to you won’t make sense to them, and anything that doesn’t to you, will.

What about making a meal which includes a component that may or my not interest the 5-year old, or embarking on a project with the 5-year old on which the meal doesn’t depend?

An example of the first type is a dinner of Ramen or Gado-Gado or Salade Nicoise or more general “rice bowls,” which all include some repetitive preparing of small batches of individual ingredients. Eggs need to be peeled. Tofu needs to be cut. Beans need their tips snapped off. Seaweed can be cut with scissors. And so on. If none of the tasks is exciting, none takes so long that you’ll end up in the weeds. And watching you do any may be as interesting to the 5-year old—and less exploitative of their labor—as doing it themselves.

In the second category—a project on which the meal doesn’t depend—I put biscuits, homemade crackers, soft pretzels, and corn muffins. (Roti could go here, too, and pita. As I cannot seem to keep myself from saying: And so on.) If today, cutting biscuits seems miserable to your child, rather than as fun as you’d imagined—”But look, you press down on this round and it makes a circle!”—you can cut them quickly with a bench scraper and be done. Cracker dough is unfussy. It won’t suffer if it gets deserted for a while while you handle another emergency. Soft pretzels and corn muffins are both simple projects which can be made to fill time—and will be if a 5-year old gets involved—but can also be done in as much time as it takes to say “You’ve already watched enough Bluey today.”

I practice what I preach, trying as often as possible, to have some repetitive element with which I could use help but don’t demand it, or a fun side project on which the night’s success doesn’t hinge. There’s a third category. It’s the one I’ve referenced above, containing things I never would have thought my son would want to do but does. When we find ourselves in this terrain, my only task is to keep a neutral face and give calm instruction on fish gutting or fileting, or correct frying technique—dropping ingredients from as close to the oil as possible—or how to lift a poultry leg to check for browning. A few days ago, my son deep fried sardines, tiny mullet, and little white head on shrimp. The following day, he could not butter his own toast.

Dear cook, I hope you’re heartened rather than discouraged by my words. By the wisdom of Jim—that is my father-in-law’s name—your 5-year old is only likely to approve of a rainy-day project if she’s been insufferable the last two weeks. Or the instant the rain clears up. The best you can do is stay your course undeterred, and be, like the USPS whom “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays.” Oh, and get a Whirley Pop.